The Arcanum (26 page)

To the vanquished citizens of Meissen it must have seemed that their porcelain factory was lost forever; all its past achievements
had been obliterated along with the Saxon army.

Most poignant of all was the fact that the battle itself need never have been fought. On the very day it took place, Frederick,
in his headquarters at Meissen, received word from Prague that Augustus and the Austrian court were at last ready to agree
to peace. All sides had finally been forced to face up to the fact that their countries had been nearly bankrupted by the
prolonged conflict.

Eager to restore his kingdom's fortunes, Frederick accepted Austria's offer to cede the Silesian territories to Prussia, and
Augustus's payment of one million crowns besides the porcelain that had already been seized as an eternal reminder of “the
fragility of human fortunes.” On Christmas Day, 1745, the Peace of Dresden was signed.

Frederick's hopes to possess the Meissen factory or to move it to Berlin had been temporarily suspended. But they were far
from forgotten.

…
jellies, biscuits, sugar-plumbs, and creams have long given way to harlequins, gondoliers, Turks, Chinese and shepherdesses
of Saxon china.… By degrees whole meadows of cattle of the same brittle materials, spread themselves over the whole table;
cottages rose in sugar, and temples in barley sugar; pygmy Neptunes in cars of cockleshells triumphed over oceans of looking-glass
or seas of silver tissue and at length the whole system of Ovid's metamorphosis succeeded to all the transformations.…

H
ORACE
W
ALPOLE,
1753

P
icture the scene. Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, British ambassador to the court of Saxony, was attending a banquet at Prime
Minister Brühls residence in Dresden in 1748. Arriving at the palace, one of the most richly furnished in the city, he was
ushered into a vast mirrored hall. In its center, long tables draped in floor-length damask were ranged to form an open oblong
around three sides of the room. Along their furthest sides were seated the invited guests: 206 dignitaries and members of
the court, all clad in their most splendid finery.

The gentlemen of the court were dressed in velvet and brocade trimmed with gold and silver embroidery and gem-studded buttons.
The ladies' costumes echoed French fashions, with tight-fitting jeweled bodices and plunging décolletage edged in gold and
silver lace and strewn with silken flowers and ribbons. Copious brocaded skirts overflowed the chairs on which they sat, falling
in billowing swags to the floor, and long trains, decorously arranged by their footmen, formed elegant cascades over the backs
of their seats. The effect was completed by gravity-defying coiffures, liberally sprinkled with jewels, feathers and flowers,
and by faces and breasts powdered white and strategically anointed with beauty spots and rouge.

Splendid though the effect of such concentrated magnificence undoubtedly was, Sir Charles's eye was riveted not by the garb
of his fellow guests but by the quite incredible arrangement on the table at which they sat. “I thought it was the most wonderful
thing I ever beheld. I fancy'd myself either in a garden or at an Opera, but I could not imagine that I was at dinner,” he
later wrote, still awestruck, to a friend in England. “In the middle of the Table was the Fountain of the Piazza Navona at
Rome, at least eight foot high, which ran all the while with Rose-water, and 'tis said that Piece alone cost six thousand
Dollars.”

The table decorations that so bewitched Sir Charles stood out, not just because they were so staggeringly elaborate, but because
they were all made from Meissen porcelain. These extraordinarily elaborate confections were to bring Johann Joachim Kaendler
and the Meissen factory for which he worked worldwide fame—and their greatest success of all time.

Taking their seats at the fountain-adorned banquet, Brühl's privileged guests were comforted by the knowledge that war with
Prussia now seemed little more than a memory, and that peace had ruled in Saxony for two years. During that time industry
had prospered and revenue was once again flooding in to fill the royal coffers.

At Meissen, political stability had brought about a period of similar progress and productivity. As soon as the last column
of Prussian troops had finally withdrawn and begun the long march back to Berlin, the Albrechtsburg had hastened to resume
production. By January 1746, Kaendler and Herold had returned from their safe havens in Dresden to take up the reins of direction.
The kilns were quickly rebuilt, the machinery reassembled, caches of porcelain paste and enamels recovered from their secret
hiding places and, at considerable cost, vast quantities of pillaged firewood replaced.

Everything now seemed to return to normal. On the one hand Kaendler was able to reascend to his former imaginative heights.
On the other Herold's obsession with status, indifference to his assistants and animosity to the modelers remained as unbending
as ever. But the ongoing rivalry between the two seems to have done nothing to damage progress, as Sir Charles's comments
testify. Kaendler was now at his most prolific, producing an astonishing range of designs to fuel the latest porcelain trend:
the passion for Dresden figures.

The idea for porcelain fountains and the world-famous figurines came about as a direct result of the Saxon court's love of
banqueting. Grand formal dinners like the one that Sir Charles attended were a regular feature of court life when the king
was in residence in Dresden. To outsiders unaccustomed to the routine, these events must have seemed more like ordeals of
endurance than bacchanalian entertainments; for a banquet might well last from midday until nine in the evening and dinners
lasting four or five hours were commonplace. Travelers to the court were left utterly exhausted and baffled by it all. “The
Germans drink and eat practically anything with pleasure. Their main object is to swallow instead of to taste,” wrote Montesquieu
with obvious disdain, while J. B. S. Morrit, an English visitor, echoed his disapproval, describing a dinner that he attended
at court as “a pretty awful ceremony… a great beastly party when you have nothing to say.”

During the protracted feasting countless toasts would be drunk, and dishes were served with agonizing slowness. By the time
a guest was able to eat a mouthful almost inevitably all the food was stone cold. No wonder then that novelties were needed
to amuse and distract the assembled company between courses, if for no other reason than to stop them from falling asleep
at the table.

Invariably a musical entertainment—perhaps an operatic performance, an orchestral recital or a display of dance—took place
during banquets and its theme was often echoed in the ornaments on the table. Interspersed between the candelabra, you would
see centerpieces in the form of miniature architectural models. At first these diminutive castles, temples, fountains and
grottoes were sculpted from sugar, marzipan or wax by the court confectioner—one of the most eminent of the innumerable members
of the staff who worked in the court kitchens. As the fashion took hold, whole landscapes and increasingly complex architectural
structures were fabricated and the settings were populated by delicately modeled figurines.

As for some extraordinarily ambitious soufflé, realism and fantasy were whipped together in the apparently boundless imagination
of the confectioners, giving rise to intricate panoramas and vistas. Icing sugar buildings mimicked those of classical antiquity;
some were lit internally with flickering candles, others discharged a display of fireworks to create a suitably memorable
grand finale during dessert; and then there were the fountainlike concoctions filled with perfumed water that trickled artfully
down the length of tables bordered with exquisitely modeled figures of gods or goddesses.

Though beautiful and imaginative, these miniature make-believes were ephemeral masterpieces, whose only purpose was to amuse
for a few short hours before being swept away with the detritus of the table. The enterprising Kaendler, noting the vogue
for such fripperies, realized that porcelain decorations would outlive a single function and therefore appeal to a far greater
audience.

So, from around 1735, a cast of over a thousand porcelain figures, together with the appropriate architectural settings, was
produced to adorn the tables of the privileged. Most of the subjects Kaendler dreamed up were based on the life that surrounded
him, and in their astonishing variety they open a window onto the rarefied world of the Dresden court. He presents us with
its star opera singers, its actors and actresses clad in the costumes of the
commedia dell'arte.
He shows us the favorite jesters of Augustus's court; the street sellers of Paris; exotic travelers from the Far East; idealized
rustics—the shepherdesses of Dresden with which the city has ever since been associated.

Above all, he introduces the elegantly clad inhabitants of the city of Dresden.

Among them he unveils Count Brühl's pushy and well-patronized tailor, astride a bucking goat. Some believe that this figure
was made because the count, in a moment of weakness and gratitude for some exquisitely embroidered piece of tailoring, promised
to reward the man with any gift he chose to name. The impertinent tailor responded audaciously by asking Brühl to invite him
to one of the king's court banquets—an unheard-of demand for someone of his lowly station. Tongue-in-cheek, Brühl promised
to see what he could do, and then commissioned Kaendler to model the tailor in porcelain. Hearing of his foolish aspirations,
Kaendler poked fun at him by dressing the figure in the costume of a grand aristocrat, but surrounding him with the humble
tools of his trade and placing him incongruously astride a goat. Goats were considered the cattle of the poor, and there were
various disparaging tales of relationships between goats and tailors in medieval folklore.

Placed upon the table in front of the king at a royal banquet, the completed figure caused riotous mirth among all those who
understood its significance. The tailor had been present at a royal banquet—but not in the manner he had anticipated. Kaendler
was so pleased at its reception that he made a second smaller version, and also modeled the tailor's wife.

Dressing up and role-playing were also royal diversions that Kaendler ingeniously mirrored. Since medieval times there had
been a tradition in Germany for
Wirtschaften
—day-long fetes when the king might don the clothes of a farmer and members of his court would dress up in albeit idealized
versions of peasants' costumes. Each participant in the fete would assume a different character or profession and, in order
to avoid duplication, roles were decided by drawing lots. So a grand countess might don the costume of a shepherdess, an ambassador
deck himself in the robes of a peddler, while a privy councillor might assume the guise of a humble gardener. All these players
Kaendler portrayed in porcelain, and one can imagine how a dinner table populated with diminutive fruit sellers, tinkers,
gardeners and drunken peasants arranged around picturesque cottages and farm buildings would have amused the luxury-jaded
courtiers who had recently dressed and made merry in such rustic garb.

Hunting was another passion of the Saxon court frequently interpreted by Kaendler. A highly exclusive occupation, in which
only the king and his retinue were allowed to participate, hunting was as emblematic of royal privilege as an invitation to
dine at court or to join the king in one of his rural fetes. Farmers whose lives depended on their crops were forbidden to
protect them from marauding wild animals, no matter what damage they perpetrated. Killing an animal without royal consent
was considered poaching and punishable by death. Jonas Hanway, a visitor to Saxony in the middle of the century, recalled
how “The wild boars are so great a nuisance to the country, that the Saxons would gladly compound to support a body of 8,000
soldiers extraordinary on condition that those animals should be reduced to half their present number. In every town of any
note there are fifty of the inhabitants who watch, five every night, by rotation, and use belles to frighten the deer, and
defend their corn from the incursions of this formidable enemy.”

But despite frequent complaints by the local farmers and the outrage of occasional visitors such as Hanway, hunting remained
an exclusively royal pastime for many decades to come. Meanwhile Kaendler's figures of virile huntsmen and their luckless
quarry enjoyed enormous acclaim as potent reminders of the thrill of the chase and souvenirs of social status.

Most revealing of all Kaendler's figures were the so-called crinoline groups, which, like three-dimensional photographs, provide
a snapshot of the intrigues, flirtations and fashions of court life. They represent court beauties of a type Augustus the
Strong would have found irresistible, laden with movement and replete with imaginary confidences. As one gazes at these intimate
creations one longs to know what exactly has led up to the moment that Kaendler has so evocatively frozen in time, and what
will happen next.